PRODUCT
BRIEF
Avaya Interaction Center
Simplifying Multichannel Contact Management In
Today’s IP Contact Centers
Overview
Avaya Interaction Center is the next step in simplifying customer service and contact
management across multiple communication channels, helping you better exceed
customer expectations during each and every interaction. Interaction Center is the
Avaya Customer Interaction Suite software platform for enterprise class management of
multimedia communications; voice, e-mail, web and IP Telephony.
With Interaction Center, your business can deliver outstanding sales, service, and
relationship management even if customers use several different communication medium
to complete a single transaction. Designed with pre-built support and integration with
today’s leading switching and contact management technologies, Interaction Center helps
businesses apply customer segmentation strategies as well as leverage enterprise business
data to intelligently route interactions to the best available resources within your business
regardless of location.
Universal Routing and Management
Avaya Interaction Center manages all interactions through a universal, media-independent Contact Engine that allows voice, e-mail, web chat, and other media to be managed based on enterprise segmentation and business rules. The Contact Engine acts a single point of control and intel-ligence for all Interaction Center defined interactions. This enables businesses to create and apply routing strategies and business rules across all channels simultaneously,instead of managing each channel separately, regardless of the physical location of agents and enterprise resources. The Contact Engine coordinates and personalizes routing decisions in concert with collecting interaction and transactional customer information to a common Customer Interaction Repository. Data capture and coordination is accomplished via a shared data object called an Electronic Data Unit (EDU). As workflows are executed, the Contact Engine uses the EDU as input and then contributes more data to it based on customer profile and other enterprise data. The EDU is created for each interaction to record the cradle-to-grave history of that interaction, and allow each application and employee that interacts with the customer to access the shared data and contribute to it. This allows your contact center to leverage the latest customer interaction and transaction history to make the best routing decision for each and every customer contact.
Through EDU technology, Interaction Center tracks and records every detail of every interaction, which a business can then use to improve future routing decisions, customer profiles, and generate additional
Mobility Services
Highlights
Seamless support for applications integration and contact management across Voice over IP, e-mail, web chat, SMS, and self service supported centrally through one common platform. Optimize your customer’s experience consistent with your business objectives by leveraging the latest in sophisticated data driven routing and Business Advocate.
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sales, the EDU allows all applications and agents to know what has occurred so far in each customer transaction independent of the media through which the interactions occurred. Previous customer contact history and business data collected via EDUs is archived in real-time to a common, centralized Customer
Interaction Repository. The Customer Interaction Repository allows a contact center operation to provide an integrated, consistent view of a customer and contact center activities, real-time and historical, across all communication medium, and across all contact center sites and locations.
Voice Contact Management
Despite the proliferation of e-mail and other channels such as instant messaging, voice is still the dominant communication medium of choice. Interaction Center Voice Contact Management manages all incoming calls and delivers the caller to the right agent with the right information regardless of location and contact center infrastructure.
Customer transaction data, interaction history, as well as any other circumstantial or enterprise data is used with common business rules to make real-time routing decisions, delivering the voice contact along with all the
relevant information to the right available agent to meet the customers need. Intelligent routing directs calls to the best enterprise resource— agent or self service — according to predefined business and routing rules, allowing faster service and more efficient use of your enterprise resources. Enterprise applications integration and screen pop enables agents with the right customer and enterprise information at the time of call, improving service and agent productivity.
Interaction Center routing was specifically designed to maximize use of existing Avaya Call Center and ACD investments. The IC Contact Engine separates application of contact management business rules and agent selection rules to optimize reuse of the high performance routing capabilities of their traditional ACD or of other intelligence such as RDBMS-based routing for voice and other media types. Contact centers can fully utilize their voice ACD agent groups and ACD routing tables to continue to handle contacts during the transition from a traditional voice call center to a blended multimedia contact center.
E-mail Contact Management
An increasing number of today’s customers prefer to do business online or via e-mail. E-mail Contact Management gives your contact center the ability to serve this growing market—with the quality and efficiency you and your customers expect.
Incoming e-mails can be routing based on several characteristics including full natural language content analysis of the message content. The agent receives a screen pop containing the customer’s message, the complete customer interaction history, and the automatically generated response—which he or she can then modify or accept the reply unchanged. Automatic scripted responses to routine inquiries reduce agents’ message load, enabling faster resolution for customers while allowing agents to concentrate on specific needs. A library of frequently asked questions aids service quality and efficiency. Contact Center supervisors can establish quality assurance rules within Interaction Center to monitor outbound e-mail service quality and agent performance in real time.
To further increase responsiveness and automation of rou-tine requests, the Contact Engine can compose personal-ized automated responses which can be sent directly back to the customer automatically or forwarded to an agent for quality assurance review. Just one more example of how Interaction Center helps managers exceed customer expec-tations while optimizing efficiency of their operations!
Web Collaboration
Today’s corporate Internet presence has evolved from yesterday’s “extra” business channel to today’s funda-mental need. If your corporate web presence cannot deliver high-quality, user-friendly service day in and day out, you risk losing your customers to your competition. Some customers find online commerce and process a bit confusing or impersonal, offering businesses the ability to differentiate service through integration of live help options must be made available.
Avaya Interaction Center Web Collaboration capabilities untangle the technology integration to your contact center with your Internet based web applications and services. It provides integrated customer self-help, intelligent routing, and real-time communication and collaboration capabilities that are fully integrated with your Internet and communications applications. Online customers can be greeted with intuitive self-help tools that provide browsing, targeted searches, and auto-matic responses to their inquiries. In addition, web
collabo-ration allows a whole host of options to enhance and deliver a seamless customer experience; web chat, collaborative browsing, web form completion, and scheduled callback. Customers can continue to view the web while agents synchronize their browsers to see exactly what customers see and assist them as they browse your site, fill out order forms, and ask questions via live Web chat.
Leveraging a patented DataWake™ technology, Avaya Interaction Center can go on step further to capture a customers entire web self service experience so your business can further personalize services and enhance customer loyalty. Intelligent hold features can improve the customer experience and your business opportunities with real-time queue updates while the customer browses the site or views specific media and messages you create. Integrated media channel support allows customers to either send an e-mail or use the web to schedule agent callback at a time of their choosing.
Consolidated Agent Desktop
Improves Productivity
Productivity and customer goodwill are lost every time an agent asks callers to repeat key data or has to waste time search for the right scripts, applications, and information. Interaction Center offers you virtually unlimited control over your agent desktop environment from Avaya developed desktops like Avaya Agent to full design control over all elements of the agent interface through a published Multimedia Software Development Kit (SDK).
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With the Avaya Agent desktop, agents are provided via screen pop access to the right information and applications to provide the best possible customer service. Avaya Agent improves service and reduces frustration via a single easy to use desktop with pre-built access to your key enterprise applications and contact management controls.
The Avaya Agent desktop ensures that regardless of agent location or switching environment, every agent within your contact center has the same controls and enterprise applications access. Developers use server side workflow and agent desktop designer tools to define a standard console that optimizes access to required scripts, information and contact management controls for web chat, e-mail, contact history, web pages, customer data, as well as back-office enterprise and CRM applications.
New context based menus and controls dynamically adjust the agent’s desktop based on the selected task. Dynamic adjustment to a given task shows only the appropriate data to the agent, while windows containing valuable customer data are visible throughout the contact session.
Managers can centrally administer agent task load and media channel workload with updates immediately deployed regardless of location or switching environment. Agent prompting can be designed to accompany each task with all the appropriate scripts or prompts for FAQs, URLs, company policies and procedures. Businesses can choose browser based “thin” client or traditional Windows
based client desktops depending on the technology and business need. Open standards based design tools enable easy customization of the agent desktop specific to your business and contact center needs.
Interaction Center also includes a Multimedia SDK that offers organizations the ability to custom design clients specifically around your customer care practices, pro-cesses, and applications all without the need for exten-sive professional services or IT support.
The Multimedia SDK greatly simplifies the client development process while offering virtually unlimited options and control over the agent desktop environment and deployment. Toolbars, communication controls, and informational displays like contact history can be designed and embedded within existing enterprise appli-cations. Standalone, web-based, or client-server clients can be deployed in any language, even alongside exist-ing Avaya Agent clients, and can support any operatexist-ing system supported by .Net or Java including Windows, Linux, MacOS, and others.
The SDK includes a single common client interface API, documentation, as well as both .Net and Java sample clients from which enterprise developers and IC Certified DevConnect partners can design new agent interfaces within their development tool of choice.
Enterprise Applications Integration
and Workflow Design
Avaya Interaction Center was designed with an open, modular architecture that lets you add capabilities as your business needs evolve and giving you flexibility in how you address your growing contact center needs. An open standards based architecture enables seamless systems integration and effective workflow management across different platforms and operating systems. Avaya Interaction Center provides voice and data collection, mapping, and reporting; event monitoring and alarming; and directory services. Open standards interfaces facilitate integration to popular e-mail systems, e-commerce software and tools, self service and interactive voice response (IVR), automatic call distribution (ACD) switches, and imaging systems. Workflow Designer is used for rapid development of custom interfaces to enterprise
The Interaction Center Manager Agent Editor simplifies configuration of agent media channel media and workload. The flexible interface supports per agent allocation of work item inputs allowing administrators to specify task load based on agent experience level.
Avaya Interaction Center includes a rich development environment that allows workflows, business rules, data models, screen layout, web-page presentation, database access, and legacy and external system access to be tailored to meet changing business needs — all without requiring low-level programming. Interaction Center includes intuitive graphical interfaces for designing both customer interaction workflows and agent scripting workflows that guide agents through sequences of steps. Agent scripting workflows are delivered as a sequence of web pages on any agent desktop through the Agent Console or any appropriate web-browser. All workflows, business rules, and scripts are centrally managed through the IC repository, and are accessed and distributed automatically
In addition, Avaya offers pre-built, pre-tested adapters to market leading CRM applications from SAP, Siebel, PeopleSoft, and many others. With Interaction Center, you benefit from a solution that is easy to install, less costly, and represents one of the most responsive integrated solutions available for your contact center today.
Operations Administration
and Management
Avaya Interaction Center Manager is a Java-based administration tool that centralizes configuration and administration of personnel and system resources. Server resources can be distributed across multiple sites and can
be grouped into different domains for addressing failover and redundancy requirements. Interaction Center Manager includes standard alarm monitoring to ensure the health of the system. It can provide real-time reporting of the status of the system with customizable charts and graphs. Avaya Operational Analyst gives contact center mangers and business analysts the ability to examine mission-critical customer data, service levels, and other performance measures across a variety of channels in support of proactive customer-service initiatives.
Avaya — World Leader in Contact Centers
Don’t let the growing flood of customer communications and requests swamp your company. With Avaya, your con-tact center can navigate today’s ever expanding communica-tion needs and help you move to a higher plane of customer satisfaction, agent efficiency, and a stronger bottom line. Avaya is dedicated to helping businesses become more customer driven, combining experience in IP communications, contact center technologies, services, and support. Let Avaya help make the web, e-mail, and telephone work together, so your business can deliver first-rate, consistent service, no matter how your customers contact you.6
Systems and Software Support
Server OS Support
• IBM AIX • Sun Solaris• Microsoft Windows 2003
Database
• IBM DB2• Microsoft SQL Server
• Oracle
Pre-built Application Integration and
Adapters
• Siebel • PeopleSoft CRM • SAP • E.Piphany • Onyx • Blue PumpkinSwitches
• Avaya • Aspect • Nortel Meridian • Nortel Symposium • EricssonIVRs
• Avaya Interactive Response• Avaya Voice Portal • Edify/Intervoice
• IBM • Nortel
Feature Summary
Agent Desktop
• Single, unified desktop for all contact types • Any mix of web based and traditional Windows clients • Agent Status and Control
• Work Status Summary • Interaction History
• Transaction History
• Common Work Handling Controls (work acceptance, transfer, conference)
• Media Dependent Controls – Voice, E-mail, web, other media
• Agent Directory
E-mail Contact Management
• Natural Language Content Analysis • Read and compose e-mail
• Auto-response • Suggested Responses
• Frequent Response library • Spell Checking
• Attachments • Quality Assurance
Web Collaboration
• Text Chat
• Voice over IP chat • Escorted Browsing • Page Push
• Collaborative Form Filling
• Customer Call Back • Chat Transcript Viewing • Frequent Response library • Spell Checking
Operations Administration & Management
• Management Console • Agent Administration Console
• Systems Administration Console
Workflow, Database, Agent Desktop Design and Development
• Workflow Designer • Database Designer
• Agent Desktop Designer
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Avaya enables businesses to achieve superior results by designing, building and managing their communications infrastructure and solutions. For over one million businesses worldwide, including more than 90 percent of the FORTUNE 500®, Avaya’s embedded solutions help businesses enhance value, improve productivity and create competitive advantage by allowing people to be more productive and create more intelligent processes that satisfy customers.
For businesses large and small, Avaya is a world leader in secure, reliable IP telephony systems, communications applications and full life-cycle services. Driving the convergence of embedded voice and data communications with business applications, Avaya is distinguished by its combination of comprehensive, world-class products and services. Avaya helps customers across the globe leverage existing and new networks to achieve superior business results.
COMMUNICATIONS AT THE HEART OF BUSINESS
